Land surveying companies and earth moving companies use rovers that can move around to survey areas of land or to move earth for various reasons. Rovers can be associated with many types of earth-moving machinery such as bulldozers, graders, and the like. In order to perform the Real Time Kinematic survey process, the rovers must receive data from at least one GNSS/GPS reference station, usually via a radio link. Modern methods now make use of a plurality of such reference stations, whose data is brought together for further processing at a particular processing center, or Network corrections control center. The rovers communicate with a control center to obtain correction data derived from the plurality of reference stations, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,477,458, hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein. The networked corrections process has evolved to the point where the accuracy available at a rover is now similar to what is obtained at a single GNSS/GPS reference station. Hence the term “Virtual Reference Station” has come to apply to a rover receiver operating with networked corrections from a plurality of GNSS/GPS reference stations.
Networked corrections may be delivered to a particular rover via a cellular connection, or, if sufficiently close to a control center, via radio broadcasting method. However, cellular communication is not available in many parts of the world, particularly where infrastructure development is underway, as in many construction projects which require surveying or earthmoving activities, and traditional radio broadcasting methods have limited range. Thus there is a need for an improved communications path from rover to a networked corrections control center.